Welcome to the new and improved mattesham.com!
This is my first big project after graduating from Drexel University in 2017 with a BS in Game Art & Production. Very shortly after graduation, my father Bud unfortunately passed away and I took a few years to collect myself before entering the Industry since it effected me greatly.
I took the COVID pandemic as an opportunity to refine my skills and teach myself a few new ones while shaking the rust off at the same time. I decided to make a wagon filled with weapons and to dedicate it to my father, hence the name Bud’s Shoppe on the wagon.
I worked tirelessly for over a year to teach myself new techniques in Maya and Substance Painter. Other than some rust, this process went swimmingly and I even streamlined my previous pipeline methods. I also used this time to teach myself nonorganic sculpting in Zbrush so that I could have low poly models without sacrificing any details. There was a steep learning curve during this process but in the end I think it improved my work more that any other method in the past.
I wanted to make all of my scene stylized while leaving plenty of room for detail and wear. I wanted my scene to have personality and for it not to appear generic. I pushed my limits creatively designing all of these elements and I believe it has paid off.
I decided to render my scene in Unreal because I want to focus on making low poly assets for games and figured this would be a great opportunity to brush up on my Unreal skills. I plan on continuing to use Unreal in the future.
While this work is not perfect I can without a doubt say it is my best work so far and am quite excited to continue to expand my skills.
To top it off, I revamped my entire website and portfolio to show off this work that I am very proud of!
Lastly, I would like to thank my father, wherever he is, because without his and the rest of my family’s support I would not know how to do any of this.
Stay tuned for more work in the future!